Bitcoin startup Brawker has announced the shutdown of its services by the end of April, 2015.
Brawker, a Hong Kong-based bitcoin retailer, has announced it will be shut down at the end of April. The company cites high competition and low customer growth rate as the main reasons for the closure.
“We are sorry to inform you that we will not be continuing the service any longer. We have tried to keep Brawker running for as long as possible, and put a lot of time and effort into it,” the company stated in a blog post.
“However, our growth rate did not meet our expectations, and the service does not scale as we would have expected to. The Bitcoin community came up with many great startups and the environment is very different from what it was 18 months ago, when we started working on this project.”
Brawker no longer processes new orders and all the transactions will be finished until the firm’s shutdown. The orders in progress will be resolved by the end of the month too.
Last year, the company ended holding the users bitcoins. For each order, it created a multisignature transaction in the blockchain, outside of the system. Those customers who have their bitcoins held by Brawker, will also be able to withdraw their funds from bitcoin wallets.
The company noted that the team has already started working on new projects that will be more useful to bitcoin users.
Brawker is a useful service, connecting people who want to sell their items in exchange for bitcoin and those who want to buy things with the use of digital currency.
The company, which was opened in 2013, firstly introduced bitcoin payments last year and enabled users to make purchases using the cryptocurrency. Besides, the service allowed people to negotiate a discount on everything they wanted to acquire, from clothes to coffee.
The discount is the difference between the current bitcoin exchange rate and the rate you agreed upon. If the customer considered the rate of the order to be too high, he or she could place a bid and counter-offer.
Those users, who didn’t want to provide their ID during the registration process, were able to purchase bitcoin using their credit cards.
“After that, we are aiming to open-source some parts of our code – particularly the multisignature framework – in the hope that some of it might still be useful to others. Do contact us if you are thinking about using it, we will be glad to help,” the company added in a blog post.
Polina is an undergraduate student at Belarusian State Economic University (BSEU) where she is studying at the faculty of International Business Communication for a degree specializing in Intercultural Communication. In her spare time she enjoys drawing, music and travelling.
